In conventional computing environments implementing a hypervisor to execute a virtual machine on a host computing device, the hypervisor typically provides the virtual machine with access to virtual resources, including a virtual disk. In typical environments, when a modification is made to the virtual disk, a new image may be made of the virtual disk image; for example, a copy-on-write approach may result in a chain of virtual disk images in which the master file and modified versions of the master file are generated, a new modification to the image resulting in a new, “child” image associated with the older files. In these environments, a request from the virtual machine to read to or write from a virtual disk may be routed to the child image. Read requests, however, may require additional routing as the child image is typically queried first to determine whether it contains the requested data; if the child image does not contain the requested data, the request is then re-routed to the parent file, whose metadata is also checked; this process recurses up the chain to the master file until the data is located. Thus, processing read requests in conventional copy-on-write environments incur an additional delay and processing burdens that increase with the number of child images.